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February 14th. Valentine’s Day. A day that means different things to different people. Of all the major holidays it is the one that by far provokes the largest range of responses. For some, Valentine’s Day is the perfect opportunity to let out one’s inner romantic. It’s a day when you can really let yourself dive into the tide of love sweeping all around you and let your heart run free. It could be the perfect opportunity to tell that special someone that you’ve had your eye on that you’re interested in them.

This will be a somewhat rambling piece about what was discussed at Monday’s AAS meeting, but if there is one thing to take out of the column it is this: the AAS has no intimate relationship with Program Board and should not be held responsible for the Spring Concert fiasco. The email that Program Board sent out to the student body about their failure to reach an agreement with an artist for Spring Concert was the first we had heard of it. Our own representative to the Program Board (Peter Crane ’15), was not updated about the progress of negotiations, nor was anyone else.

While the recent email sent out by Program Board about the Spring Concert came as a disappointment to many students, it was met with more resignation than indignation. There was almost a sense of inevitability to it; it is not harsh to say that the College has not organized a successful Spring Concert for years. Spring Concert is supposed to be a time of campus unity and satisfaction arising from a rewarding experience and a great band the entire school can enjoy.
Last year we had Mike Posner. This year, we’re probably going to host nobody.

Christmas began last year in the United States on November 25, on the heels of our national celebration of over-stuffing and cross-country flights, as it is every year. It snuck in after the last dishes were dried, took its place at starting lines across the nation, and took off with a bang: a Los Angeles woman pepper-sprayed a fellow shopper who took the last Xbox 360; in Florence, AL, police stun-gunned a man and arrested him. Altogether, Black Friday shoppers exorcised a record $52.4 billion in a free market feeding frenzy.

Europe as a continent and a society didn’t just teeter on the precipice of destruction, it fell off — twice. It is from this history that the European Union has become a living dream of nonviolence and proof of the possibility of redemption, created from a cry for harmony and the necessity for coexistence.

“Apparently, the world is not a wish-granting factory,” says 17-year-old Augustus Waters, the co-protagonist of young adult author John Green’s latest novel, “The Fault in Our Stars.” Augustus and the 16-year-old narrator of the novel, Hazel Grace Lancaster, are forced to come to terms with this fact in a much harsher manner than most teenagers are as, by the start of the book, they have both been diagnosed with cancer.

Every Amherst student has something special that got them accepted into this school in the first place. There are any number of things that can help someone get in, from the mundane such as good grades to the extraordinary like being a ballroom dancer. Each Amherst student has some great quality that helped them land here: most students have much more than just one. There is, however, one qualification that plays a major role in admissions that no student has any control over, and that is being a legacy.